The incoming recession isn’t good news for those seeking jobs overseas. Employment conditions for migrants are likely to tighten. This is however understandable, and intending migrants shouldn’t be too depressed about the problem.

The jobs aren’t going to be there anyway, until the recession cools down and business picks up. There are other things you can do, and you might even wind up doing better.

There’s another factor. Employment protectionism is no longer the big problem it used to be, thanks to the global economy. The world has changed. You can work anywhere on Earth using the net, and you can deal with this period of international insularity pretty easily. In that sense, employment protectionism is just a nuisance, not a real obstacle over time.

Alternatives for people seeking international jobs

1. Contract work

One of the options is to look for contract work. The competition will be intense, but some economies are better placed than others to deal with this situation. The economic downturn is likely to be patchy, and some countries will follow the US lead in economic stimulus packages.

The advantage of contract work is that it doesn’t pin you down and you know your time frames. You have some structure and ways of planning your moves. Some contract jobs also pay a lot better, depending on where they are. If you can find a job in Dubai, you’re likely to be better off than doing an office job in some other country.

2. Plan ahead

The fact is that the demand for skilled workers is only on hiatus under these conditions. In the next 10 years, Baby Boomer retirements, if delayed, will create massive demand for skilled workers all over the world. So if you can upgrade your qualifications, and cover your costs, you’ll be well placed to take advantage of the changes in the whole global economy.

3. Extra training for better jobs

The irony of the Baby Boom retirement effect will be that the demand may well outstrip supply. There will be millions of jobs, and the evidence is that the West, thanks to its unbelievably stupid high costs for qualifications, won’t be able to supply the workers.

Extra training will make foreign migrants much more competitive in a job boom. It might take a decade to reach its peak, but it’ll be worth waiting for. Contract experience will also count in favor of applicants, so keep an eye on opportunities.

4. Environmental jobs

One sector less likely to be affected is the environmental sector. This is a very different employment market, more based on commitment than money. If the pay isn’t too spectacular, the experience, qualifications, and the fact of doing something to help the world are compensations.

There are also some qualifications you can’t get anywhere else in the environmental sector, and experience no other sector can provide. Particularly useful for scientific graduates. This is another global sector, and it’s a rapidly expanding area of employment as the world wakes up to the need for urgent environmental work.

5. Non government organizations

Also relatively immune to the normal pressures of the commercial job market, NGOs are also great for credentials in your profession. The standards of work are extremely high, and the career CV is greatly enhanced. These organizations also provide major levels of support to people in desperate need, so your time won’t be wasted.

Charities in particular are important NGOs, and they cover an extremely broad range of skills. They also have excellent training and career elements. If you’re the sort of person who wants to contribute to your society, charities are a definite option.

6. Sciences

The sciences have some reasonable grounds for complaint in terms of research money, and the recession doesn’t really help much in that regard. However, research doesn’t actually stop, and many important programs are protected by their sponsors, being vital to business or government programs.

7. Medicine

Medical employment isn’t going to go out of demand any time soon. Regardless of economic conditions, those services will be required. Again, this is a highly competitive field. The jobs are also extremely demanding, but employment levels are hard to cut under conditions where the medical sectors were already heavily cut.

8. Internet jobs

As a backup career, internet jobs are pretty straightforward. Everything on the net, from web design to web content to affiliate marketing and much more, can be done remotely, and you can create a business.

In terms of conventional job hunting, this work is another major CV asset. That’s partly because the internet work is unique to yourself, and partly because it often covers experience online which employers don’t have. Either way, it’s a very useful way of adding income and qualifications.

9. Education

Not many people become millionaires being teachers. That said, it’s one of the most important and most dependable of the employment markets in terms of numbers, if not job conditions. With a career in education comes a form of stability, and qualifications which do have uses in commercial practice in the education sector.

That is a potential career advantage for those who care to try it out. Education is a multi billion dollar industry, and the jobs are increasing as demand for education come from mature age students and people upgrading their qualifications, reentering the workforce. There aren’t really enough teachers, and with the rising population predicted in the next 20 years, the demand, if anything, is likely to rise.

These skills are also global. Education is now becoming a major global industry in its own right, and the career opportunities are better than ever before.

The economic meltdown and the reactionary policies are temporary. You don’t need to give up on your dream job, or your career.

All you need to do is look ahead a bit.

Anticipate the problems, and they stop being problems.

The question is, how?

One thing’s for certain. Sending employers your resume is fine in theory, but in practice, particularly in difficult economic times, there are no guarantees.

Job hunters actually have two priorities. The first, obviously, is to get a job. The second is to achieve career movement. This is career targeting, and it has to be done properly.

Problems in career targeting

The brutal fact of job hunting is that not all jobs lead to career movement.

People have to get jobs, and when they get them, the results are often quite far removed from the career ambitions. Some are in other fields, some are dead end jobs, some are in completely different industries from the preferred career.

That doesn’t make the career impossible, but it does make getting your career moving a lot more difficult. It’s sometimes overlooked in the idealized Follow Your Dream scenarios that many people trying to make progress in their careers are in physically and mentally punishing jobs.

Your desire to become a concert pianist may be interrupted by your work on the morning shift as a janitor. Being a warehouseman doesn’t necessarily help you become a brain surgeon or a fighter pilot.

The work, the hours, and the stress combine to make getting some jobs a rather mixed blessing. Add to that the fact that the career is at least temporarily off course, and it’s not a pretty situation. The job is preventing the career, in this case. Some jobs seem to be designed to prevent doing anything but that job.

For the unemployed, the choices and options are a bit simpler, but the need to get a job is so important that any chance of selecting a job is more luck than anything else. The dream job might show up in a job ad, but not often.

In both cases, jobs are short term goals. They serve a purpose, but they’re not the whole story, just a means to an end.

The best career approach is that these jobs, and the realities of job hunting, don’t interfere with the long term goals.

Which is where targeting becomes a real asset. Because you’re really looking for a career move, you have to think long term anyway. As most people know, not all jobs are gems. Even some positions in your career field, as you would have found out after a few attempts, don’t necessarily take you where you want to go.

It’s a matter of getting the right job, and this is where targeting is essential.

Career targeting

Career targeting is really about making the right career decisions.

If you’re job hunting, career targeting is an art. You need to know your profession. But decision making’s a relatively simple process, because you can define what you’re looking for, and you know what you don’t want.

So, you can start by an example, and just fill in the blanks.

• What’s the best job in your profession?
• What are the qualifications and skills required for that job?
• Do you have, or can you get, those skills, and if so, how?

This is a map which practically draws itself. It’s usually more A to Z than A to B, but the progression is reasonably easy to understand, and you know where you’re trying to go.

Now comes the targeting. Again, it’s a simple enough process, but you do have to know how to achieve your goals to make it work efficiently for you. You have to plan a way of getting to the best jobs.

The logic is very straightforward:

• Which employers have the best jobs?
• Which employers have the interim jobs that will give you the skills and qualifications for the best jobs?

These are the employers you will need to target. This actually saves you a lot of time, because you’re avoiding going through jobs that don’t lead to your goals and may even prevent you from progressing. You don’t get distracted, or pulled away from your career ambitions.

Sort out possible employers and research them. You’re looking for an employer with a good track record, profitable, and preferably with a good profile in the industry.

Regarding actual employment, just ring their HR people and ask about any available jobs at your level. That way you get contact names, you establish a relationship with them as an interested person.

Even if they’re not hiring, you will learn a bit about them, and how to go about targeting them as a future employer. If they use an employment agency, contact that agency, express an interest in the company, see if they can help.

For the sake of a phone call, you can get a lot of information for free, information you can’t really get any other way. It’s always worth the effort to check these things out.

Targeting in practice

Targeting requires research. You need to know quite a bit about these employers, and you need to be able to produce a good application when the opportunities arise. You also need to be able to target the next step in your career effectively.

Any career progression is by definition a step up. With that step up, you need to have the right claims to the higher position.

Say you’re a salesman, and you want to become a sales manager as your best career job. There is a position available, and you’ve checked out this employer, who’s a very profitable, upmarket business. Just working for this company is a career asset, and it’s a great job.

To get this job, you need to prove not only your sales credentials, but your management experience and abilities.

In this case, you don’t have those skills, at least not as a manager. You were, however, a team leader in your last job in the industry. You know the nuts and bolts work. You did get some exposure to management, and you do have the essential knowledge, because team leaders are de facto managers in sales, working with the same basic figures and inputs.

You approach your target employer. You ask about the position, explaining that you’re not too sure about your suitability, so you need to check out the position in more detail.

Detail is exactly what you will get, and it’s all useful. You may not be suitable for this particular position. But you will get a lot of information about this move you’re trying to make.

The HR person asks about your team leader role, and sounds a bit dubious. You mention that you did have to do all the figures for your team’s sales, which is, of course, part of the manager’s fundamental responsibilities. The HR person asks if you ever did the sales division figures. You say you didn’t, but you did have an input for your team and were in the meetings when the figures were reviewed. You know the process.

The HR person is describing the job in detail with these questions. These questions are about essentials, the things you must have for your career move. So far, you’re not doing too badly, as a matter of fact. You’ve at least made the point you do have the basic skills and knowledge.

This information also applies to other jobs of this sort. You’re getting a kind of guided tour of the areas you need to address in your application. The HR person eventually suggests you lodge an application, because you’ve at least convinced her you’ve got some claims to the job.

At the interview, it turns out that you’ve also got more claims to the job than the other applicants. Your team leader role was a very good introduction to the practical aspects of the sales manager position.

This is where targeting can take you. Check out the jobs you really want, and find out what you need to get them.

The big issues in recessions are

• Income,
• Expenses,
• Accommodation,
• General stability in your life,
• Figuring out how to finally escape from the unemployment trap

This is survival, and you need to watch your step. Even getting a job has to be kept in perspective.

INCOME

How you get your income is the primary concern, but you need more than one option. Living on welfare is a grinding, frustrating, infuriating process.

It’s also the bottom rung of the ladder, and it’s not the only possible source of income for some people.

There are other options, depending on your profession, qualifications, and what’s available. These other options are sometimes very useful, and you can improve your employment and career moves.

These are a few possibilities:

• Arts grants
• Student grants/allowances
• Literature grants
• Mature age training schemes
• Community schemes
• Philanthropic scholarships and grants
• Paid internships
• Online jobs
• Self employment

These grants and schemes are a step up from unemployment benefits, any way you look at them. They’re all training related, so you’re also picking up skills which can translate into jobs.

For mature age people, study and other options are a bit easier to get. They may take a bit of finding, depending on where you live, but they’re not impossible.

Many student and training support schemes are based on long experience of the realities of the needs of people in these situations. They’re pretty good, if not luxurious, and you don’t have to trudge around in the unemployment desert with no sense of direction.

Internships aren’t flashy jobs, but they come with career credentials on the other end of them. They are real jobs, and they do help down the track when you’re going for full-time professional jobs.

Self employment is a realistic option for some people, if their skills can translate into a cash-generating business on any level. Most unemployment benefits aren’t particularly generous, and self employment looks a lot better on a CV than an empty space. It proves initiative.

Not great jobs, but-

In really tough times, some jobs are better than none, even if they’re not particularly impressive in normal employment markets.

Even commission sales jobs can work, if you’re prepared to put in the effort. They’re tough, and notoriously hard work, but if you have the talent, they’re a good option.

Demonstrator jobs in supermarkets, and other acquired tastes are a bit of an improvement, particularly if they generate better money and ongoing work.

Important Note: There is a downside with these types of jobs. If they don’t deliver in terms of return for effort, move on and try something else.

EXPENSES

• If you can cut or share costs, do it.
• If you can afford to use some of your savings, do it, provided it leads somewhere.
• If you can avoid spending, do it.
• Learn how to budget for food and covering costs.
• Make life more bearable with affordable entertainment and a social life.

The financial problems in recessions can be severe beyond belief.

Everybody’s having a hard time, and you need some reliable way to cover your tail and stay afloat.

Realism can be a very annoying state of mind, but with costs it’s essential. Try and have some spare cash for when you actually need it.

ACCOMMODATION

For those that don’t know, it is quite possible for anyone who’s been living on an average wage to find themselves at risk of losing the roof over their heads when they lose their job.

Never take accommodation costs for granted. Rents can be murderous, and you need a place which is both acceptable and affordable. Cheap and nasty can be real trouble, but some people pay far more than they need for accommodation. You need a decent place, but a sustainable cost.

Mortgages, need it be said, can get mean, and become serious problems. Sad to say, sometimes they’re more dangerous than it’s worth. People saddled with the high mortgages for homes during the housing bubble need to consider their options. Sometimes that means the mortgage just has to go.

Getting rid of a mortgage and selling is not easy in a falling housing market, but it’s necessary if the mortgage is likely to sink you.

GENERAL STABILITY IN YOUR LIFE

Above all else you do not need any further crises while unemployed.

If you’re young, you may need to change your entire lifestyle to avoid the normal teenage trouble. That’s not morality talking. It’s because you’re extremely vulnerable. Everybody goes through this phase, and the fact is that the teens and early 20s are more at risk than anyone else in society.

The lifestyle is frantic, and trouble comes with it. Being unemployed makes things a lot worse. No money equates to no options. Worse, it also means no way out when you’re trying to avoid situations. Just stay out of harm’s way.

Older people, most of whom probably have had some experience of unemployment, also probably know the score. For them, it’s like being nuked. The story is duck and cover. Don’t stick your neck out, and you’ll probably still have your head attached.

There’s nothing good about unemployment.

For most people, it’s a brush with poverty, and it’s not a lot of fun, however cute mainstream media makes it look. You need a life you can live. Stabilizing your life means cutting risks and really working on survival above all else. For some people this really is life or death.

FIGURING OUT HOW TO FINALLY ESCAPE FROM THE UNEMPLOYMENT TRAP

If you’ve done all the other things, you can now have the luxury of working out how to get control of your life.

The unemployment trap is a very simple thing. It’s been making the lives of people miserable for centuries, and it’s easy to see why, when you see the pattern

Say this is the pattern of employment of a person aged 18:

1. Job (3 years)
2. Redundant- Unemployed (2 years)
3. Job (18 months)
4. Laid off- Unemployed (18 months)
5. Part time job (3 years)
6. Cutbacks- Unemployed (1 year and counting)

At age 30, this person has an employment record like a sieve. This won’t be the star candidate at interviews, and the CV won’t look too interesting. Even spread out over 12 years, the actual period of unemployment is 6 years. It’s more, if the part time job is considered on percentages of full time work.

This is a very ordinary work record, much like many younger people who can’t find their way into long term work. It wasn’t even this person’s fault, to lose those two first jobs.

However, this is the trap. The cycle is obvious, and the idea of finally escaping the unemployment trap is to break that pattern, permanently.

The solution varies a lot, between individuals, but the basic idea is to have something working for you all the time. If this person had taken a second part time job, or had started up some sort of business as a sideline at any point in this 12 years around the workforce, they’d be out of the trap.

The continuity of employment offsets things like redundancies, layoffs and cutbacks. They’re not as much of a problem for future employers, and the financial situation of the job hunter is a lot better. The risks are reduced.

In this case, instead of being a 30 year old with a serious situation, things would be relatively stable.

Even in this case, there are still ways out. Getting more skills, creating more options, and doing more actual exploration of possibilities will, eventually, break the cycle.

In a recession, you need all the help you can get.

If you can help yourself, you’re on your way out of the trap, and you may be able to get out under your own power.

The concern about gaps is actually a rather strange concept in the modern workforce. Very few people have complete CVs, with no gaps. Yet, common wisdom acts as if there’s something wrong with anyone who hasn’t been fully employed since finishing their education.

Presumably people are supposed to start work at 18 and stop at 65, and that just doesn’t happen any more. It’s neither a realistic, nor a productive, approach to hiring.

There are a lot of good reasons for gaps in CVs:

1. Couldn’t find a job. That is a very good reason, thanks to the current employment culture. The average job candidate has about a 1-5% chance of getting any particular job interview. Then there’s a 10% chance at best of actually getting the job. So out of 100 job applications, taking maybe a year, the actual chance of getting a job is about 1/200, and in some industries, with a lot of applicants, that’d be a charitable assessment. On that basis, is a year or two an unreasonable gap, or is it practically unavoidable?
2. Reentering the workforce. There’s no better reason, and it’s not really up to anyone to tell people why they’re reentering the workforce. Retirees, single parents, people who are now able to work after illness, there’s any number of real world situations. Some people reenter the workforce after extremely serious life experiences, and it’s not up to the job market to tell them they had a problem.
3. Problems with former employer, left job, couldn’t find another. For some reason, HR and employment culture has taken it upon itself to act as a fully unqualified judge jury and executioner. Employers, presumably, are always right. The courts wouldn’t agree. You’d have to be a complete ignoramus to assume everything is always sweetness and light in any workplace. Particularly at a time when litigation against employers is at an all time high, and employees are winning most of their cases. These things happen. It’s called reality, and if you’re making a point of not hiring people on some vague theoretical principle, with no idea of the actual situations, how good are your hiring practices?
4. Too many jobs. This is still a problem, somehow, even when the whole workforce is turning over every few years. The workplace of the 1950s is gone, and it’s not coming back. Employers have to realize that sitting in one job for the rest of their lives isn’t a viable career option, and hasn’t been for decades. The current workforce is the most mobile in recorded history, and that’s just not an arguable point.
5. No record of steady employment in any of several different fields. The implication is that the employee is unreliable. The fact is that the employment market itself isn’t reliable. Downsizing is directly responsible for millions of people being out of work. Bad business practices, where staff are penalized, their jobs cut to save costs, is another reason. There’s always a reason, usually more than one, for these scrambled work histories. Don’t guess. Find out the reasons. They may be very good reasons, and you may be about to not hire someone who you need.

Ethics aren’t taught in HR seminars. They should be, because that would make comprehension of employee situations a lot simpler. It’d also make the job market a much more rational place.

The present employment market apparently doesn’t recognize real human lives as being relevant to employment. The workplace is still Dickensian, like something out of David Copperfield, where people are supposed to act like they’re living in a doll’s house, just sit still and listen to the clock ticking.

It’s been a very long time since these values were applied anywhere but the job market. That’s causing a lot of frustration for actual employees, too. This is one of the reasons for extremely high turnover in the job market and frequent gaps in CVs. Some jobs are just not viable for employees. Expectations from many employers are ridiculously out of date, and in some cases barely legal.

You’d think people were just stacked on shelves when not on the job.

The most trivial things become issues:

• Having to pick up the kids is some sort of major drama. Never mind the reasonable legal and moral obligations of a parent, the employer wants those extra 20 minutes.
• Family emergencies are designed to persecute employers. Rubbish. Try telling someone with a sick kid they don’t have a problem.
• It’s worth paying a manager to treat adults like naughty school children. Absurd, and expensive. You get much better performance, and far more commitment, out of people who are treated like human beings.

People naturally resent this sort of infantile treatment. Job dissatisfaction is one of the primary causes of people leaving work, and it’s usually because of job conditions. The jobs are either unbearable or irrational, or sometimes both, and people won’t stay.

Therefore the gaps in CVs.

Employers create them.

About 90% of the workforce has, or has had, some sort of gap in their work history. It’s usually related to some sort of traumatic event in their lives. Sometimes it’s the job itself, sometimes it’s a horrible combination of the job and their own personal lives. Ill health is now a very common reason. In many cases the workplace is the cause of the health problems. Stress is now an epidemic, and the entire employment industry is well aware of that.

Exactly how the employment market managed to get stuck in a mindset belonging to the 19th century is debatable. What’s not debatable is that it’s no longer a realistic view of the workforce to assume a solid chronological continuity in employment.

These are facts. They’re daily headlines in the employment industry, and very little seems to being done about dealing with these issues.

Just remember the next gap you see in a CV may be in your own.

There’ll be good reasons for it.

People are hired on a value basis. Just being an administrator or an accountant is no longer any sort of definition of the actual work. Employees are now hired as one of several possible assets:

• Money Maker
• Money Savers
• Good judges with expertise
• Good analysts

This is a long way removed from the old purely cost/job valuation. Employees are now being actively checked for their talents, not just the ability to do a job. It was an inevitable result of the previous labor-intensive approach, which was routinely made hopelessly ineffective by bad job design.

If you’ve been through a few restructures, you’ll know how bad some of those structures were. The theory was that a certain value of business, done at a given cost, created margins. In practice, the cost of doing business blew out regularly, as technology and rising demand increased volumes of work, and the various job designs became obsolete, in some cases before they were even implemented.

Nobody admitted it at the time, but the fact was most administrative systems hit saturation point very quickly, and actually cost money to run. All that downsizing was a reflection, in part, of how hopelessly out of step business administration had become.

Now, having more or less solved the problem of methods, profitable business is being seen as a result of better methods, and above all, better ideas. That lesson took a long time, and a lot of suffering, to learn. The only good thing to be said about it is that it has opened the way for a saner, and far more realistic and efficient, approach to hiring people.

For job seekers, this has had the very major benefit of creating a lot of opportunities. The new approach to hiring makes career paths much more open to development. Instead of a simple progression, it’s now possible for people to truly develop their careers rapidly, and do it in a highly diversified way.

The four categories tell the story:

Money Makers

Some people have real talent as creators of wealth and profits. These are the ideas people, either creating new concepts, or developing them in the market. They’re quite invaluable to employers, for obvious reasons.

They’re also very well placed in the new economy. Commercial ideas are the basis of the entire global economy. It is possible to create a truly brilliant career in any industry. Some of these people are excellent problem solvers, other can produce whole new concepts. In an ultra competitive marketplace, ideas are a commodity in their own right.

Money Savers

Also very much in demand are those with the skills to reduce costs. This is a very demanding art, these days. In the past, slash and burn downsizing saved money, but incurred a terrible cost in loss of skills and experience. It’s only after the carnage of the outsourcing and downsizing excesses around the world that employers have learned what loss of human capital really means. It was an expensive lesson.

Money savers are true economists. They increase efficiency, without losing capacity to produce. They’re one of the forces working to reduce internal business bureaucracy, which is now seen as a true obstacle to modern commerce. They’ve founded a whole new approach to business, using realistic approaches to business needs without sacrificing performance.

Good judges with expertise

Judgment is a gift. The ability to correctly judge a situation is one of the great talents of management. It makes or breaks businesses. There are some people whose personal talents are such that they can be not only experts in their fields, but reliable predictors of scenarios in business.

Any organization, and any business, creates potentially dangerous, costly, situations for itself as it grows. Some businesses take on situations they can’t handle. Some make bad decisions based on faulty data. This is where the good judges come in, and in the extremely complex global market, their role is very much risk assessment.

They know their fields, they know their market, they usually know more about the industry than their employers. Many of them have wide ranging experience across their careers, and are much more familiar with the risks. They can be consultants, they can be project managers, but above all else they’re hired specifically for the human capital value of their personal skills.

Good analysts

The modern business generates and receives so much information that data overload and disinformation are common problems. Somebody has to get into the torrents of news, reports, spreadsheets, and other décor of management, and make sense of it.

Statistics can be useless, information can be highly misleading. In any business context, that’s dangerous. It’s unavoidable that business has to rely on data from its market. That information is critical. If the analysis is incorrect, or reading the signs is done badly, a lot of time and money can be wasted. A project can be an expensive disaster, a new product range or new financial package can be a total failure.

Analysts are really interpreters. They know how to assemble and correlate facts. They can access and verify information. Business analysts are the lucky souls that have to put what may well be a chaotic supply of information into a comprehensible state.

Good analysts are not merely good at their work; they turn the normal scrambled egg of data into meaningful information. This is a talent for bringing order out of chaos in its most literal sense. These people occur at various levels in any organization. They’re the human mainframes who can organize information into a working asset.

As a hiring criteria for human capital, good analysts are always in demand. They’re usually found in situational interviews which are often very much based on how people handle information. Businesses like good analysts, because it can save them a fortune in outsourcing. That lesson, at least, has been learned.

You can see where this approach to hiring is headed. Talent, for once, is getting recognition as a functional asset. It’s taken a long time, but if you’re a talented person, it’s likely to be worth the wait.

For job hunters, this could be the vindication of years of trying to find a job where skills are finally appreciated. Let’s hope so.

The big shakeout in the American financial sector has a lot of side effects for the employment market. The Credit Crunch means new businesses are finding it hard to get capital. It also means that cost cutting is the new way of hiring.

Call it outsourcing by other means, but the result is going to be one thing: A net drop in payroll costs. Middle America is likely to get hit hard, paying for the financial sector’s mistakes.

Some big chains have dropped plans for opening hundreds of new stores. Others have closed chain stores, and that’s a reflection of the real response to the financial crisis.

For employees, job hunters, and entry level people, the outlook isn’t terrific. There’s no clear end to the financial situation, so playing safe is going to be the natural response of employers, until they disentangle themselves.

The employment market has also been experiencing ongoing job losses, which doesn’t just mean people losing jobs. It means restructuring where those jobs no longer exist.

Expansion no longer means lots more jobs in many industries. The modern workforce is a lot leaner, and in the current employment situation, America’s cheap and nasty job insurance environment, a lot meaner.

The basic defence against tough times in the job market is keeping your job options open, not being stuck with only one possible type of job.

That means you need a lot of transferable skills, preferably across a wide range. Fortunately there are now quite a few skills which can be used in any workplace:

IT Always in demand, even at base level. It’s an indispensable part of business and even if the wages aren’t great at lower levels, it pays bills.

Accountancy Every business on Earth has some form of accountancy.

Database/Systems Also part of the employment furniture, someone has to know how to operate these systems and make them actually functional.

(In some cases one person winds up doing all three. If you have this sort of experience, you can talk yourself into a job pretty easily by just pointing out you fill some pretty obvious possible gaps.)

People wondering what sort of extra skill sets take note:

These are the skills you can get pretty easily. If you intend to operate your own business later, they’re quite invaluable, and you won’t be wasting time or money getting the training.

That’s the bottom line in a really tough job market.

The economy is not stable, and the job market is contracting and getting hit severely. Don’t assume there will be an instant fix to this situation. So far the lack of ideas is the main symptom of the financial disease.

Job hunters are strongly advised to go defensive with their time and budgets.

Only go for jobs where you’re sure you’re not wasting your time.

Temp jobs, part time, downscale, whatever can keep you in the black and solvent is useful in this sort of economic environment.

Watch the pennies.
Spend some time looking at jobs you previously wouldn’t have considered.
A job that pays your bills is better than a hole in the bank account.

Stay mobile, able to use opportunities.

Survival is the name of the game.

There are a variety of reasons why people don’t get interviews:

1. Too many applicants.

This is the most common reason, and even if you’re 98% suitable for the position, there may be 20 other applicants who are 99% suitable. The sheer number of applications, particularly in highly competitive industries like IT, means that 90% of applicants will not get an interview.

2. The selection and culling process

Employers select interviewees by reducing numbers of applicants. They have to work on the basis of getting the candidates most likely to succeed. If there are 100 applicants for a job, at least 80 will be rejected, even if they meet the criteria and there’s nothing wrong with their applications.

3. The selection process isn’t perfect, itself

Nobody in the employment industry has ever claimed that the methods used for selecting interview candidates are perfect, or anything like it. Far from it. Mistakes are made, regularly. Hiring the wrong person isn’t exactly unknown. The many drawbacks and failings of the system are now a hot topic. Google recently scrapped the standard interview methods as being effectively useless for finding the people they need for a good fit in their corporate culture. Better methods of selection are now a major issue in the industry.

4. Lack of information to candidates

In many cases the job advertisements are themselves flawed. Applications are made on the basis of information which may not reflect what the employer is looking for. That’s partly thanks to employment agency advertisers getting it wrong, and partly because employers don’t give the advertisers enough information, or don’t brief them effectively.

5. Applicants often don’t contact advertisers for more detail

Some job applicants tend to assume that the job ads provide all the information they need. That’s not a safe assumption. If you have a look at some of the job ads, you’ll find a lot about being a great team player, and the rest of the usual useless blurb, and much less information about the actual position. Always try and get as much information as you can about a position. You can save yourself some time, for sure, because the contact person may tell you something that makes it clear that’s not your job.

6. Application is out of date, or not properly targeted

We’ve found that a standardized CV simply does not meet all cases, even if you’re a professional with all the right qualifications. Your application must stand out, and show direct relevance to the position. The entire CV may need an overhaul to show your skills and experience in relation to any specific position. Remember that all the employer has to go on, in terms of your application, is the information you provide.

7. Entry level positions aren’t simple, either

The greatest possible misconception about entry level positions is that less is expected of them because they’re entry level.

The idea that I’ll obviously have less experience and less on my CV, because I’m only just now qualified must be avoided.

You need to show a range of skills and motivations to separate you from the other 200 applicants who also think that they can just provide a bare bones application and have a chance. A few extra words about your skills do count, and can be the difference between getting a job and having a life, or staying up to date on the daytime soap operas. You need to produce a credible statement of your abilities.

8. Not learning from past experience with job applications

Not getting an interview can mean you’re making some basic mistakes.

Don’t tolerate not knowing what you’re doing wrong.

Get on the phone, find the person who did the cull of applicants, and find out why you weren’t successful. If the answer is that your application didn’t stand out from the others, get some details, and find out why. There’s a real risk you could be undermining your own chances by not including information, or by expressing yourself badly on your CV, and misleading employers with information which is ambiguous.

Another, very serious, and very possible, problem, particularly with experienced applicants, is that you’re sending in applications which are too verbose, with too much information. You could be obscuring the very things that make you a suitable candidate.

You need to know.

9. Job application fatigue; not checking your application before sending

If you’ve been doing a lot of applications, the most likely situation is that mistakes are creeping in. It is perfectly possible even to send the wrong job application to the wrong employer.

Most likely are:

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If necessary, use the job ad as a checklist. Tick off each point on the job ad regarding the information you have to send to them. Make sure you’ve covered the essential criteria.

Use a clean page for your application, and only cut and paste one piece at a time where appropriate, not the whole of a previous document, because you can be sure there’ll be mistakes with a whole document.

If possible, get someone else to check your application against the job ad before you send it. Quality control has to start somewhere, preferably before you send in your application.

10. Be realistic about any job application

The heartbreak in any unsuccessful job application is quite avoidable:

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11. Being overqualified

Ironically, employers are wary of overqualified people. Not because they don’t believe they can do the jobs, but because they can be seen as potentially expensive, too good for the job, and the logic of going for a position downscale doesn’t always appeal to employers and interviewers. Older people sometimes find their levels of skills and experience are higher than the supervisors or managers. That sometimes looks threatening. Highly qualified younger people can look quite strange to employers who don’t understand their reasons for going for a position below career norms. You may need to include in your cover letter your reasons for applying.

12. Career path job applications; finding a way round obstacles

These are tricky. If job applications on your career path aren’t succeeding in getting you to the interview stage, you have a genuine problem that must be solved, and solved quickly.

But with career moves, you can’t pin everything on job applications, anyway. Rejections should be seen as temporary delays, rather than major obstacles.

You need to be able to find alternative career paths, in self defence against the grind of the application process. It’s advisable to make direct contact with possible employers and do some cold canvassing prior to making your career moves. You’ll get more information, and you’ll also make contacts.

13. Cover letters

The cover letter is part of your application. It’s an additional tool in making your case for your application, and it also needs to be targeted to the essential criteria of the job. The cover letter is sometimes considered to be a summary of the application, so keep focused on the important points. Style comes second to information, in this case, the better the information the more interested the employer will be.

Don’t get verbose in the cover letter, either. Stay on topic.

Emphasize your achievements, your qualifications, and include a reason why you want this particular job. Include as many hard facts which support your application as you can fit on one page.

14. Irrelevant information

If there’s one major turnoff for anyone reading a job application, it’s irrelevant material. If you’re going for a job as an IT technician, that’s what the employer needs to know about.

Don’t clutter it up with information about your job as a shelf stacker for the local supermarket. Leave that to the employment history part of your application.

Do not include anything which is going to take up time and has nothing to do with the job application.

The faults in any job application are always findable.

You must check out any situation where your applications aren’t hitting their targets. Above all, you will need good information about making applications for the jobs you want when you find them. Make contact, get the information, and use it to design your job application.

Your contacts can provide that information, and they can answer your questions, so you’ll be able to create much more effective job applications.

Reality check.

The facts are that if you make ten job applications, you’ll only get to interview stage for two or three, on average, at best.

Don’t even bother getting discouraged, it’s not worth the time.

Just get on with it.

You do have to go through this process, it’s unavoidable, and it has to be done properly to get results.

All you need to do is make sure you’re getting your applications right. That’s where you have control of the process, and that’s how you’ll get the job.